I am also from Germany and get payed for donating thrombocytes at my university hospital. The compensation is actually quite substantial imo at (up to) 75€ per session, which can be done every two weeks. The money is however mean to offset the time required, not the thrombocytes donated. So it is correlated to how long it takes.

You get 15€ (?) for up to 15min (if they have to abort very early for some reason or at your first visit where they just draw blood to test), 50€ for up to 1h (which equals to 1 instead of 2 pack of thrombocytes, usually done at your first real donation or if you maybe dont have enough for 2 on this particular day), and 75€ for anything over 1h (which is the norm).

Timewise the hospital is on the outskirts of the city, so most will have to travel a bit, then you have to fill out forms, have a quick talk with the doctor, and finally depending on your parameters it takes anywhere from ~55-70min to extract, during which you are tethered to a machine (which takes out some blood, then seperates out the thrombocytes with a centrifuge, pumps back the rest, and repeat).

One could get philosophical about the topic, but from a practical perspective the money makes a lot of sense imo:

• It costs them a lot of money to investigate new prospects, so you want reliable repeat donors

• Each donation already has other costs associated with it. Like for example the kit used during extraction, the staff handling everything and so on. So even those 75€ are just one more expense among many, and from donation to usage probably vanish in the overall costs.

• For the donor it is quite a substantial time commitment, especially when done regularly every two weeks. Unlike for example full blood donations you’d maybe do twice a year. And you should be reliable and not randomly cancel at the last second, so ideally it also has priority over some other things in your life.

• the small amount of blood that remains inside the machine is sometimes used for other research (if you agree to it, which i do)

From my own experience i can say that i might still do it without, but certainly not at the same frequency. And considering the time and effort required i don’t think anyone could be blamed for doing it less frequently without the incentive. So at least in this case it imo is a fair trade and net positive. Although it does also help that this is a university hospital that directly uses it themselves, rather than a for profit company.

I also have regular problems with some subtitles. My solution is to enable using an external player in the jellyfin AndroidTV app (i think its under playback->advanced options) and then use VLC player which i’ve also installed to play the movie. That has never failed to me.

Downside is that unlike the regular exo player i don’t think it supports dolby vision, so i have to change this setting back and forth occasionally. It used to be that there was an option that you could tick, so it asked you everytime which player to use before playing a movie (with the downside that it couldn’t resume playing at a saved timestamp), but after a somewhat recent update this went away.

I’ve had two USB C ports fail on HMD phones.

Yeah, that’s what got my HMD made, Nokia branded, 7 plus. And from a search at the time this was a common problem

I guess marketing getting rolled into that number, as opposed to movie budgets where it is usually separate could make up for it. Or it includes lots of long-term investments similar to the huge stage surrounded by screens (“the volume”) that they used for the mandalorian. Although I am not aware that acolyte did something like that.

Countless examples of movies and shows with way smaller budgets that end up looking a lot better than most of the recent Disney slop.

Yeah, but that just goes to prove that money doesn’t solve every problem. It didn’t fix the writing either. The spending part is easy enough.

And yet it carried a $180m budget, more than something like dune part 1 (and slightly less than part 2).

Agreed. I remember when lightbulbs got banned here in the EU starting from 2009 to 2012 in steps. Here in Germany plenty of people were mad and hoarding them.

Nowadays with the larger focus on energy prices, especially in light of the russia-ukraine war, it seems insane that not even that long ago to light a room one or multiple lightbulbs using 65-100 watts were used. That’s like the equivalent of an office PC running just for some light.

Star Trek is probably a better comparison, than what i was thinking of. My mind was more on things like El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie that got a very, very limited release and serves as an epilogue. Or maybe the Psych movies that are probably more like an episode in movie form (havent seen them).

Guess we get to see how this format works out nowadays.

But those aren’t usually big budget movies, right? Probably more in line with the cost of a few episodes. And how often do they get a theatrical release?

I’m obviously just speculating here, but i assume the Star Wars Mandalorian movie will get a proper release with a marketing campaign and all the jazz. Doubt they’ll just make something cheap and drop it straight on D+.

For me the reason it took a while to come around and watch Andor was that by the time it released we’ve had quite a bit of mediocre Star wars content recently released. So there was some fatigue setting in.

Yeah the marvel comparison comes to mind. And if I remember correctly that was just a single season of WandaVision. So much less compared to the 3+boba Fett crossover in this case.

There definitely is a good amount of overlap between movie and tv audiences, especially for something like Star Wars, but they definitely aren’t completely the same.

Yeah, no doubt that it was the most popular one, but I think it’s still a potential limitation to the target audience. Especially because it’s not even just a season limited season, but 3 with some crossover to another one.

It’s good that you mention that it might not need as much previous knowledge, but they better communicate that. And even then I feel like some might feel like they miss out not having seen the series, while at the same time not wanting to be forced to watch it.

I’ll assume for the mandalorian movie to make sense you’ll need to have seen the full series? And for that one might also want/need to watch some of the boba fett one?

That would feel like a lot of homework for a movie for anyone, who is not a huge fan.

Right, totally forgot about that step.

Haven’t used it myself, but similar to casa os there is also cosmos os, which looking here seems to offer some build in storage management options. Maybe this could be worth looking into?

openmediavault is ok for raid, but the containers aren’t one click wonder like in other NAS OSes

Since OMV also uses docker compose with a build in GUI to manage them, I don’t assume this would be what OP is looking for either? Unless trueNAS also comes with some repository of preconfigured compose files.

I am currently using Openmediavault for my NAS and can confirm that with an official plugin so far I havent had any issue with my ZFS pool (that I migrated from trueNAS scale since I didn’t like their kubernetes use and truecharts, but as someone mentions they seem to switch to docker).

Otherwise I am happy as well, but I am far from a poweruser.

Fallout probably got a boost from the new series, that was quite well received.

Same. The thing lacking is user base and content. Also a backlog of older content as knowledge source, but that would come overtime with through the former.

As far as usability goes Iemmy is just as good as reddit was for me. My instance (lemme.ee) is stable and the app experience (currently “connect”) is just as smooth as it was for reddit (where I used “relay”).

I sadly have to admit that I don’t contribute enough in terms of creating and posting threads.

Is the 10 VI Sony’s midrange? It’s certainly priced like one, but within their lineup it would be the lower end, no? The 5 would be their midtier offering.

Yeah, slightly better now, but still lackluster in a phone of this class.

Especially considering that eventually every phone in the EU starting June 2025 will be required to offer at least 5 year updates. You’d think that they could offer that level of support slightly earlier to someone willing to drop well over 1k€ on their phone. Unless of course they plan to pull out of the european market at that point.